Auxiliary
"It's not as though I'm using. My body has just developed a massive drug deficiency." :- Random gangster Tactical Analysis * Vi Populus: Auxiliaries are drug addicts grabbed from the streets of the Sprawls. Cheap, easy to amass, and with a decent amount of health, they are effective against most armour types. * Student of the Streets: This comes at a cost, however; an Auxiliary is quite literally a guy off the streets. Handed a gun and homemade pipe bombs, Auxiliaries aren't so much trained or directed as pointed at a target with the instruction 'kill that'. * Human Shield: While they aren't much better than an Aggressor, Auxiliaries aren't meant to be war winners; rather, they are used as human meatshields, in order to protect the IMPORTANT people from the enemy. * Lethal Injection: In an emergency, an Auxillary can inject a special drug supplied to them, making them temporarily invincible to anti-infantry weapons. That said, this drug will eventually overload their nervous system and kill them. Background "No one has ever made an estimate of how many junkies are lying out there. And then again, why would anyone bother? It would be like counting garbage." :- Legion Security Officer from Rome. Life in the Sprawls is a tough one. It has been compared to London in Dickens' era, though sociologists have noted this is something of an insult to Victorian London. The massive arcologies of the Sprawls pack massive numbers of people into giant artificial ant-hills where the land has been so developed that one could live their entire lives without ever seeing the ground proper. The greatest Sprawls have no night or day, just a perpetual gray under the geodesic domes, the lower levels illuminated only by the glow of the neon lights. They are busy, claustrophobic, dirty and dark, and those on the bottom rung often want to escape, even if just for a few hours. Fortunately, nothing is easier in the Sprawls. Most governments around the world run extensive anti-drug campaigns. In Japan, addiction is a grave dishonour, and drug dealers are ruthlessly hunted by the Yakuza for tarnishing the names of criminals everywhere. In the Soviet Union, drug use is almost unheard-of thanks to the omnipresent social services and difficulty bringing in foreign products (If vodka was a drug, the entire country would be drug addicts), and the Allied Nations run a comprehensive War on Drugs that is widely considered unfairly one-sided, and there are even mutterings of banning cigarettes based on recent research in Germany. In the Sprawls, you can buy recreational drugs at the corner store. To the Syndicate, drugs are just another form of recreation. The Syndicate's pharmaceutical companies have developed a wide variety of drugs for every situation, ranging from "happy pills" that just make the day brighter to potent injectors that send the user into spirals of psychedelic imagery for hours at a time. Most of these drugs are addicting, though the companies have found that a lower-key, more controllable addiction leads to longer-term customers, and because it wouldn't do to have their citizens overdosing in the streets, these drugs are carefully refined to be fairly safe. As a result of easy access and the relative safety of the habit, pretty much everyone partakes, and socially, the worst side effect seems to be increased junk food consumption and the threat of being ambushed by somebody trying to educate you on how much they love you, "man". These companies have even gone out of their way to ensure that all the drugs have the same addicting chemical, Smilex, so that the addicted can purchase any of the wide range of drugs to feed their addiction, allowing the companies to market them better. How exactly these circumstances fell into place is completely unknown, and while many a Sprawl-dweller spends hours on the Interwebs arguing it is a sign of the effectiveness of Randian Objectivism, the more likely case is simply corporate policy; the Syndicate don't want their Sprawls being filled with drug killings, street dealers and overdoses. After all, they are too busy exporting all that to other nations. And there is another side to this policy. When the Sprawls are threatened, Legion Security experts hit the streets in armoured vans offering combat webbing, machine pistols, pipe bombs and free drugs to anyone willing to man the defences. This is the sort of offer that most can't refuse, and they swarm to the vans for a chance to see some glory through the lens of a drug-addled brain. They follow this van right into combat, while the free doses get stronger and stronger, so that by the time they hit the field, the new Auxiliaries are thoroughly numbed to the idea of combat and can be pointed at the front lines of the enemy. During offensive actions, similar actions are taken with the surrounding populace, drawing out the existing addicts. In any case, the result is large group of shock troopers so addled that they'll walk into anything unflinchingly, closing to range to use their machine-pistols somewhat effectively. Auxiliaries aren't really intended to be effective combatants. They have no training outside what they learn on the hard streets of the Sprawls, and their weapons are inaccurate and of low quality. What they do provide is a buffer between the enemy and the Syndicate, keeping the enemy at arm's length so that the Syndicate can employ their range advantage to greater effect. Auxiliaries are the ultimate disposable infantry; it literally can't get cheaper to deploy a human being onto the battlefield and have them do anything but run away. During the walk to the combat zone, most Auxiliaries are given small micro-softs with basic combat theory written on it, things like taking cover, firing their weapon, and some basic enemy identification lessons. One of the artificial instincts in the device instructs users to employ the "special injections" they received just before hitting the field when the situation gets bad. What they do know is that this injection contains an extremely potent drug that'll temporarily boost their endurance and strength to superhuman levels. What they don't know is that it's not exactly safe for human consumption, and will likely burn their nervous system out completely. Alas, thus is life for the throw-away soldier. Just the Stats Category:Units